more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites. The more cruel the
rites, the less is the civilisation. The red-hot poker with which Mr.
Bouncer terrified Mr. Verdant Green at the sham masonic rites would have
been quite in place, a natural instrument of probationary torture, in the
Freemasonry of Australians, Mandans, or Hottentots. In the mysteries of
Demeter or Bacchus, in the mysteries of a civilised people, the red-hot
poker, or any other instrument of torture, would have been out of place.
But in the Greek mysteries, just as in those of South Africans, Red
Indians, and Australians, the disgusting practice of bedaubing the
neophyte with dirt and clay was preserved. We have nothing quite like
that in modern initiations. Except at Sparta, Greeks dropped the
tortures inflicted on boys and girls in the initiations superintended by
the cruel Artemis. {33} But Greek mysteries retained the daubing with
mud and the use of the bull-roarer. On the whole, then, and on a general
view of the subject, we prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece
was a survival from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New
Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa is a relic of
civilisation.

Let us next observe a remarkable peculiarity of the turndun, or
Australian bull-roarer. The bull-roarer in England is a toy. In
Australia, according to Howitt and Fison, {34} the bull-roarer is
regarded with religious awe. 'When, on lately meeting with two of the
surviving Kurnai, I spoke to them of the turndun, they first looked
cautiously round them to see that no one else was looking, and then
answered me in undertones.' The chief peculiarity in connection with the
turndun is that women may never look upon it. The Chepara tribe, who
call it bribbun, have a custom that, 'if seen by a woman, or shown by a
man to a woman, the punishment to both is _death_.'